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The spinach was a famous singer…

The pretty much unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence (AI) tends to provoke various manifestations of dystopian doom and gloom. Take jobs. AI is going to steal them from us all, automating our livelihoods away with unrelenting ruthless efficiency. For the pessimistic among us, the glass is not so much half empty as bone dry.

It’s undeniable – plenty of jobs are indeed being taken over by AI. (And a fair few are being created, too. Hello, all you data scientists out there.) But what of the job of writing? Can AI replace Shakespeare? Will An Algorithm be the next Patti Smith? Shall computers pen lyrics as poetic and popular as the Beatles? The latest evidence suggests this is still a long way off. So long in fact as to be quite possibly never reachable. Advances are nevertheless being made in this direction. Researchers are currently developing AI that can turn brain activity into written text, which is pretty amazing. But as yet it is producing translations that are more surreal than accurate: “Those musicians harmonise marvellously” was decoded as “The spinach was a famous singer.” As a random generator of the wordy weird and wonderful, AI gets a big thumbs up. But it is no replacement for the brains, blood and guts of great writers crafting brilliant stories of all shades and forms. So my glass remains resolutely, happily more than half full.

Cheers.

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Natural brilliance…

For lovers of brilliant simplicity, a block of wood that lights up when you touch it, giving you a lovely way into your online world:

“Humans are designed to interact with nature,” says Mui Lab’s Kazunori Oki. “So we put a natural material between you and the information. So you can get a natural feeling rather than touching or talking with plastic keys.”

A great example of the ‘truly good and beautiful’, it is due to go on sale later this year. Add it to your 2019 Christmas list.

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The loving product of silence and slow time…

Towards the tail end of the 1950s, Laurie Lee wrote lyrically and longingly On Craftsmen:

“We are a starved society living in the midst of plenty. Our possessions are many, our serenities few.

If we look at objects fashioned by the hands of craftsmen, we instinctively recognise something we need, something we may almost have forgotten existed any more – something designed to keep us human. For the handmade object is one of the last visible defences of humanism left to us, and the craftsman ministers to our most basic spiritual needs.

The materials he works in – wood, stone, clay, iron, living wools and natural hides – are still those divine materials of the earth for which there are many substitutes today, but no replacements. His products are the result not of the juddering steel press, die-stamp and reeking chemical synthesis of mass production, but of human skills and judgements which have filtered down into these pages, into this moment, through unbroken generations of eyes and hands.

It is this we are in danger of losing forever – the virtue of the handmade object, whose making yields to no factory speed-up, but is the loving product of the master craftsman, of silence and slow time. In robbing man of the use of his hands, mechanisation mutilates his spirit also.”

Zoom forward some sixty or so years, pause briefly to doff your cap to the current fascination with all things primitive tech, and linger awhile here – with a 2018 take on the enduring importance and appeal of craft, courtesy of iA’s Oliver Reichenstein. As Oliver says, “We know that what is truly good is somehow beautiful, and what is truly beautiful is somehow good”.

So long live craft, and the long-lasting loveliness it creates.